The reviews are a bit mixed, but a lot of the strongest detractors of this game are also reviewers I don't typically click with, and while I appreciate that Edwin gets a little more lyrical in his style of writing, it sometimes feels like a diversion from some kind of personal dislike he has for certain games.

Dammit, I think I might still get this one. Something about its whole vibe really clicks with me. Reply+1

That puts their shipments for 2017 at 19.4m, actually the same amount as 2016. It seems like PS4 sales have plateaued, which is understandable, but if Sony play their cards right they can probably cruise along with sales/shipments close to that level for a bit longer still. They'll smash PS3's final sales easily, and reaching the PS1's 102.5m shouldn't be too hard, either. Reply-2

Personally, I don't see my Switch getting that much use this year, aside from Bayonetta 2, which I still haven't played.

Give it another month or two before you make that call. We still know very little about Nintendo's planned line-up for this year. I think the Bayonetta re-releases and Kirby are the only Nintendo-published titles with firm release dates at the moment!
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Super Mario Odyssey has sold 9.07m units in about two months. The current best-selling 3D Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy, sold 12.72m in its entire life. Given that Mario titles tend to be evergreens whose lifetime sales are often a few times what they sell around launch, it's quite possible Odyssey will eventually enter the league of some of the bigger 2D Mario games, but we'll see.

At 1.06m, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is already the best-selling game in the series, though that's probably helped by being released on a popular console (unlike Wii U) and earlier in that console's life (unlike Wii). As far as we know, it's the first game in the series to top a million sales, and it did so in under a month.

As Eurogamer said, Splatoon 2 has outsold the original. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is only about a million sales behind the original, and will probably overtake it this year. Breath of the Wild's 6.7m sales already makes it the third-best selling Zelda game ever, and if we include the 1.1m sales known for Wii U, it's second only to Twilight Princess.

On the console front, 14.86m consoles in 10 months is faster than the Wii (13.17m shipped in 10.5 months), the PS4 (14.4m sold through in just over 12 months), DS (14.43m shipped in a little over 13 months) and probably somewhere not too far behind the PS2's early period (which is harder to gauge because it launched in Japan much earlier than everywhere else).

@grassyknoll Well, neither 1-2-Switch nor Arms were released on multiple consoles. Their marketing costs were probably a lot lower as a result, and being made by the same company as the console they were released on, there would have been no licensing fees to worry about. Some games need to sell millions of units to be profitable, others don't.

I'm not especially into either 1-2-Switch or Arms myself, but I think Nintendo could get away with funding sequels to both. Reply0

@grassyknoll Dude, you do realise a decent number of people bought Arms, right? Like, easily enough to warrant a sequel. 1.35m at the end of September. I'm sure Nintendo could spare the resources to do another Mario Kart, too.

I'd probably still play this one in handheld if I buy it (which I'm likely to at some point), but it really does look like Flyhigh are setting a great example of how to support a game after its release. More developers should have this attitude. Reply+2

I think it is easy to forget that what you are actually paying for is the design and ingenuity behind the products. These are not just cardboard shapes that the switch sits on, but they have been designed alongside games that work with them.

The parts in these products would also have to be custom-manufactured, which I'm told is more costly to produce than you'd think. Aside from that, the cardboard parts can also be bought separately from the game and one can even download the designs online (EDIT: this last bit was apparently incorrect, you can't download the designs - although it shouldn't be hard to make duplicates if you've got one set), so I don't get the impression this is Nintendo trying to gouge consumers.
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This certainly looks like one of the more unique ideas Nintendo have come up with; reminiscent of a more detailed, user-built version of some of the casings we saw for the Wii remotes back in the late 2000s.

It's probably not for me, but I can appreciate it and I'm sure kids will love it. My nieces certainly will.

Meanwhile, for anyone who is lamenting the lack of some kind of exciting reveal from Nintendo, it's worth keeping in mind that we know next to nothing about their first-party line-up beyond Kirby in March. I imagine a Direct detailing the kind of games that people on here would care more about is probably due some time soonish. Reply+9

Maybe there's a theme there for you Chris? The "Green Light" series - aka how did that game get started/signed/made.

This is a great idea, and it could totally run parallel to "Here's a thing".

I'd also like to echo the people above commenting on the brilliance of M+R's puzzle-like design to many of its levels, especially its bonus levels. There are many instances where one is given a huge wave of enemies to face off against or a single turn to tackle seemingly impossible objectives and it really pushes the player to think more deeply about how to make the most of the game's mechanics. It's just brilliant.
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Not my thing, but I'm happy to see Switch get a sought-after series like this regardless. I know a lot of people who have been clamouring for it and I could see it broadening Switch's audience a little. Reply0

@Pierre2k The last 25% of Tropical Freeze was definitely the hardest. Nothing in the first five worlds was especially brutal for me (except perhaps for the level with the giant octopus), but the sixth world is consistently tough and the bonus levels are nuts. If you're keen for a real challenge, it's worth going back and finishing it all. Reply+1

Straight up, I still think this was the best game on Wii U (7/10 from Tom Bramwell be damned).

There's something really beautiful about the way levels flow into one another. Take the savannah world, where a lightning storm in one level leads to a brush fire in the next. Or the fruit jungle, where Donkey Kong makes his way first through levels where fruits get harvested, then chopped up, sweetened with a bit of honey, and in the last levels of the world, made into jelly, jam, or popsicles. More than any other platformer I've played, Tropical Freeze finds ways to makes its levels feel distinct while still having a sense of unity. It's marvellous.

The absolutely gorgeous soundtrack helps matters, too.

I probably won't double dip unless there are new levels, but I'm so happy to see this game get a chance to find a bigger audience! Reply+2

Given that the first year of a console's life tends to dictate the next few, this bodes very well for Nintendo. Good on 'em, they did a really great job with Switch in 2017 and I think the sales are well deserved.

Jury's still out on whether this means much Western third-party support - I could see some more custom-built versions of bigger franchises like AC and CoD, not sure about anything else - but the console should be pretty set for indies and Japanese stuff, which is fine by me. Reply+3

I hope this pans out for them, I feel like before Nier they couldn't really catch a break, even when they were making great games they didn't sell too well

Given that most of their projects have been middle-tier affairs, I doubt they've really needed to sell in massive numbers in order to make a profit. Hence why Nintendo would have been willing to fund Bayonetta 2 (and possibly 3, although Nintendo's involvement there is unclear). A lot of these guys worked on Viewtiful Joe back in the day, too, and that did well enough to get a couple of sequels.
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Seconding the comments that Zombi is a good game (I've got the original Wii U version). It does apparently have some of the multiplayer aspects stripped away, but the single player campaign is the key aspect anyway.

A little rough around the edges with one or two cheap bits, but atmospheric and sometimes genuinely tense and scary in a way I don't find the genre manages often. Reply+3

Mario + Rabbids took a bigger hit than I'd like, but this otherwise seems to be a much more agreeable top 50 than the staff one. Really happy to see Xenoblade 2, Cuphead and Thimbleweed Park (which I didn't expect to see on either list!) make this top 50 where the other one cruelly snubbed them.

I also voted for Tumbleseed, but realistically I knew that one wasn't going to get anywhere near the top 50. I'd be interested to know where other games placed; I doubt that one would have even made the top 100. Very few people seemed to bother with it. Reply+5

@eshy76 I agree with all your points. The top 50 and the discussion in this article both seem to point towards particular proclivities - for starters, I get the sense that the boys at EG aren't really into overly Japanese games (JRPGs and VNs in particular). When Japanese developers cater more to Western sensibilities it's a bit different, but I found the lack of love for things like Nier and Persona 5 rather telling.

On your point 4, there are a couple of female contributors at EG who I would have liked to see involved more heavily in making this top 50, like Aoife and Cassandra (who seems to be the main JRPG fan around here, funnily enough - I think she's the one who reviewed Persona 5). Reply+2

I played a bit of Arms and liked it, but not so much that I wanted to run out and buy it for myself.

I genuinely think EG could look at having separate awards outside of their overall top 50 or whatever. Things like "Best Fighting Game" or "Best Character Design" or "Best Artistic Direction" - all of which are categories Arms could fit into. Then perhaps Martin wouldn't feel so compelled to bring the game up at every possible opportunity.

The point made about Breath of the Wild - "It's not a good Zelda game"/"Well it's not trying to be a Zelda game in the traditional sense" - was an excellent one. I think it's the reason a lot of sequels get flak if they try to do too many different things from their predecessors, or the reason games which blend genres or playstyles in new ways often don't go over all that well. A lot of people, whether they'd care to admit it, are looking for something familiar. They want their games to be different only in incremental ways, not in ways that throw the playbook out the window. That Breath of the Wild managed to shake up the formula so much without alienating most of its fans is really impressive, as it was when Nintendo pulled off the same feat with Splatoon in 2015.

My favourite takeaway from this discussion, though, is that Christian was still watching America's Next Top Model when it was up to like season 22. I thought I was the only one. Reply+5

I'm a little disappointed, but not entirely surprised, that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 didn't make the list. Games that release in December are already at a bit of a disadvantage; this is doubly true if they're enormous, epic JRPGs. It's definitely one of my personal stand-outs for 2017, though I'm still only a little over halfway through it despite buying it on launch day.

I'm quite surprised that Cuphead didn't make the list.

I also genuinely expect both of these games to fare better in the user poll (at the very least I think they'll make the top 50). Reply+9

I'm surprised at some of the order here, but I'm okay with it. Like most things on gaming websites, it's subjective and it doesn't validate or invalidate my own personal tastes.

Having only just tuned in and skimmed through #50-21 in the last half hour or so, I'm mostly just really pleasantly surprised to see Golf Story sneak in at #50. It's not a game I would have expected to see on here, but I found it delightful. Reply+4

Highly recommend. I also realised that growing up, and becoming an adult (apparently) it is something we haven’t done for 10, 15 years. Envy those with young kids who get to experience couch co-op and the joys of simple and fun multiplayer games. Good times !

This is the aspect of multiplayer that means the most to me, and it's why I always favour local over online. Yes, online can mean being subjected to barrages of predictable insults, but even the solution of just playing with real-life friends doesn't appeal to me when I can have them pop around for an evening, order pizza, take a break to watch three episodes of The Good Place (or whatever new show one of us has to show the other), and so on.

Overcooked is definitely high on my list of things to buy, but we've been pretty busy playing through Death Squared and Thimbleweed Park together. Snipperclips was a stand-out this year for me, too, and a couple of months ago I discovered the joys of Crawl and local Rocket League at a friend's place. Lots of great options for those of us who don't really care for online, although it's definitely nice to see more diversity in the online offerings as well.

And yes, Merry Xmas to everyone here! Eurogamer is the only games site where I make a point to read the comments sections (even on some of the clickbaity articles). The contributions from the community here are generally excellent.
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@Malek86 That's a good point, too. I do find myself wondering if Atlus will get that engine working on Switch (I figure they're bound to bring more of their games to Switch eventually as Vita winds down) but such things take time. Reply0

I second the calls for a Switch version! I get why they'd be doing a Vita version - it actually sold fairly well in Japan, which is probably the biggest market for this game - but Switch is also likely to have a bigger user base than Vita by the time this game comes out. Reply+2

As a few other people in here have mentioned - and as the article alludes to - this seems like a fairly classic case of expectation vs. reality. Even if the DLC isn't especially earth-shattering, a certain amount of the disappointment here is on us, not Nintendo. Reply+2